Thoughts on designing an incomplete future

September 24, 2008

Black Boxes, Rap Metal and Screwdrivers

About six months ago, I posed the question during my presentation at the IA Summit: "What Killed Information Architecture?". While I had some glib answers for the audience at the time, I didn't really have the perspective to answer the question. Only now am I starting to get a handle on what I think is wrong, and what can be done about it.

I won't be answering the question today, but I am going to start to set some of the stage for the answer that needs to unfold. I've realized that my perspective on the stagnation of Information Architecture as a field is quite complex, and can't be boiled down into a nice clean answer. I certainly don't think that it's about "Defining The Damn Thing". Sorry folks, I've decided to stop putting all of my effort into digging that hole.

Mashup Methods

At the AAAA Planning Summit this summer, I talked about how I thought that IA's were somewhat good at method innovation, especially when it came to building new methods out of mashups of old ones. I referred to this as the "Robin Hood Effect" - stealing from other fields to prop up our capability as a discipline. Over the last 15 years, IA has been extremely successful in stealing from other fields to cobble together "a way" of solving problems around the organization of information. I'm now convinced that it's protected us from having to do any real work in the area of creating new tools and methods for IA.

The problem with stealing is that it's breeding out the ability of information architecture to create new capability and value. We're getting lazy, and we're starting to accept whatever tools other other fields put in front of us. This laziness has been a long slow slide. Jesse James Garrett wrote IA/Recon back in 2002. When I read Recon today, I feel terrified. While we haven't regressed, we didn't move forward either. If we stay this course, information architecture is probably only a few years away from being marginalized and mostly irrelevant.

To be fair, the last few years have been very good for the information architecture field. If you have a bit of experience you're probably happily employed and have a nice title with "Sr" or "Lead" in front of it. You're most likely an expert at wireframing and card sorts and you can put together a mean mental model. You might even be mashing up some of your own methods. Wireflows? Swimlanes? Mashup methods are good, right?

I used to think they were, but now I'm not so sure.

Black Boxes and Rap Metal

People I've worked with may have heard me throw around the term "Rap Metal Innovation" before. It's a disparaging quip I use to describe what happens when you take two seeming good ideas and try to combine them into something better and more powerful. It doesn't always work. In the case of Rap Metal, combining Anthrax and Public Enemy eventually resulted in Limp Bizkit.

Real innovation creates long-term change and sustainable advantage. It's not a fad, and it's not something you discard; its value does quickly not diminish.

I'm not seeing much method and tool innovation in the information architecture community these days, and when I do, it's increasingly the equivalent of Rap Metal. I'm not suggesting that method mashups are killing information architecture, but I am suggesting that they are a symptom of a larger problem with the discipline. Like a lurking shadow, most of us would rather whistle and walk faster than turn and face the darkness.

Getting back to my point about laziness, I'm going to draw an analogy from software engineering. Using an API is not the same as writing a library of software objects. It's not too hard to throw together a mashup from a bunch of exposed interfaces on a web API. It is a lot harder to write the library itself. With IA right now, most of our problem solving is based around superclassing and subclassing a relatively small number of tools and methods from other fields. We don't seem to care what's inside an object; we're comfortable with the fact that it's a black box that we can instantiate in the context of IA.

This is part of the problem. It's superficial problem solving for the here and now. In the last five years, I can't identify a single original method that has grown up inside the IA field. Everything, including my own work has been stolen and instantiated from some other field's parent class. This is keeping our head above water, but I don't think we can keep treading for much longer.

As we continue to solve yesterday's IA problems with borrowed tools, we're increasingly stuck playing catchup with the emergent nature of the web. Today it's about the link, but one day we'll wake up to discover that the link is just one part of the rich environment that the web is becoming. I know I'm being overly dramatic here, but we'll never have the tools to build the future capability of information architecture if we're just borrowing stuff from other places. It's time to seriously invest in a new set of tools, and we're going to need to build some of them from scratch.

Hand me the Screwdriver

During my IA Summit presentation last spring, I suggested that information architects weren't good at deconstruction. I still believe that, but I'm starting to think that we'd benefit more from taking stuff apart in a thoughtful way instead of just breaking things. This means we need to take a screwdriver to some of these black boxes and start looking inside. This won't give us insight into what kinds of tools and methods we need to build, but it just might give us a sense of what kinds of thinking goes into rolling your own.

We have to start somewhere. If we can't build our own tools, we can't build our discipline. Tools and methods are only one part of the solution, but they're something useful and tangible for the practitioner because they create immediate value. They're also something that we can use to bump up against the real problems and see if we're making any progress. I'd like to be able to go to the IA Summit in 2010 and see a couple of really good presentations about failed methods. That's one of my performance indicators for the health of the IA discipline; people talking intelligently about failure.

In my mind, learning from failure is a damn good screwdriver. It's something we need to embrace if we want to build a discipline that's based on original thinking, and not just Rap Metal.

13 Comments

If information architecture is dead, then what is it that you do?

Five years isn't all that long in the grand scheme of things... is it? Even so, the internet has changed significantly during that time and I think we have adapted and played a role in shaping that change... We don't necessarily reinvent our approach overnight - but slowly, I think we have now finally developed a somewhat consistent set of pretty useful tools. Think about it, scientists don't constantly create some new version of the scientific method every five years... They rely on the structure to help drive innovation, not kill it. I think through some methodological consistency, the outside world is finally twigging to the inherent value in applying these IA ideas to a web project. I don't think that's death of the of our field... I think we are finally coming to life.

Very curious though... what kind of homegrown IA tools do you think might propel us into the future of the web?

Seeing as I can't buy you a drink right now, just imagine we're in a bar, smiling, and I've liquored you up. Real good, too.

So, now that you're properly situated...

What the fuck?

Seriously. What do methods have to do with the discipline? I know many out there are thinking I'm questioning whether the sky is blue, but I haven't seen any clear argument as to why the methods one uses have anything to do with one's profession or one's discipline.

(In fact, I think Andrew's correct about the community solidifying around a central question, not a central doing.)

Surely, methods only define *your* practice of *your* discipline (paid for under the guise of *your* profession).

If that's true, that methods mean diddly squat, then any -- alleged -- rap-metal innovation would be irrelevant.

There's also an assumption here that says a discipline needs to create *new* methods to maintain its value proposition. Do you have examples of disciplines where this is true? (Either, they're developing new methods and are valuable, or, conversely, have no new methods and are dying.)

Again, I still question the assumption that our methods are central to our value and vibrance as a community.

Lastly, the part about deconstruction seems totally bizarre. (Let me get you another beer. Shots? Sounds fantastic!)

Saying IA is bad at deconstruction seems a tad bizarre since deconstruction forms the basis, it frames the preeminent, most fundamental, foundational activity of the IA discipline. Collecting requirements requires a careful, rigorous deconstruction of business, user, and technology goals, capabilities, agendas, and constraints.

Our favored activity, affinitization, requires that one has deconstructed all the parts and scattered them about so they can be reconstructed. We take three existing narratives (the user, the business, and the technology), tear them all apart, and then construct a new story.

IA, like many emerging disciplines, isn't just based in deconstruction, its fundamentally post-structuralist, believing, fervently that anyone, anywhere, can rewrite any narrative -- redesign any experience -- to make it more relevant and more poignant to their own personal story.

This is great... and a thoughtful, worthwhile challenge.
When I worked on my Linkosophy talk, "taking the screwdriver to IA" is a great way of putting what I was trying to do.
If we think of "taxonomies/wireframes/mental models/etc" as the "black boxes" -- I want to crack those open and see what those methods/tools contain. What are we actually manipulating, changing, shaping when we do those things?
What I ran up against was: we don't have a language for what's inside the boxes yet. Why? Because it's *new* in human history.
In the same way that Bruce Sterling is having to invent words like Spime for stuff in the ubicomp world, we need to either make up new words, or repurpose old ones, for the new sorts of matter that came screaming out of the big bang of the Web.
In addition, we have to be able to explain what it is about that *stuff* that's important to design & business.
And that, unfortunately, drags me kicking and screaming back to the "define the damn thing" sort of talk ... but it's not just for its own sake.
By my druthers, we'd have new tools that focus on context -- determining where it begins & ends in a given situation, what rule-based patterns do to it, what sorts of visual language is appropriate for describing it (maybe a modeling language for connecting semantic structures to contextual experiences), tools that help us weigh business impacts having to do with context (if a user is in a store on a cell phone, is a new semantic framework necessary vs what we'd use when they're at home on the Web?).
Of course, these are all just top-of-mind guesses, based on my own addled hallucinations.
Now, I also think we don't need to beat ourselves up too much for using hybrid tools. But what we don't want to do is (if I'm getting you here) just go about saying "I'm doing some library science and some HCI on this here Web design problem, and voila problem solved" without cracking it open and understanding what is *new* about this problem space, and dealing with it at its essential level.

MOLLY: I agree we're not as far gone as Matt's post makes it sound. But at the same time, a lot of IAs (and those who hire and talk about IAs from outside the community) assume that IA is about making meticulous, static information structures. That's, in part, a result of describing the IA practice by pointing at "legacy" tools, ideas & methods. When, in fact, we're using these tools/ideas/methods for something radically new, in very new ways. But the community isn't very self-aware about that, and those outside the community are especially unaware of it. Hence we have somebody like Adam Greenfield presenting at EuroIA "Why I'm not an IA and you shouldn't be either." So, I agree that the IA practice isn't "dead" -- but it does need to mature into its own distinct entity.

AUSTIN: yes, I think it's more about the questions IA concerns itself with than the tools we use for the inquiry. But as I said above, all most people see are those tools, and that old, outdated language. The Polar Bear Book, as excellent as it is, still describes IA as primarily an exercise in complex user-centered categorization. That's a worthy skill, to be sure. But it's merely foundational, not aspirational, and it doesn't explain what is fundamentally different about the virtual/semantic/digital/whatever spaces that IA designs.
By the way, the way you write about deconstructing and reconstructing is brilliant -- but it's the first time I've ever seen IA (or UX in general, for that matter) described in that way. (I hope a fleshed-out version of that's going in the new Blueprints?!?) It's *that* sort of intellectual heavy lifting that the IA community's been lacking for quite a while. It's been 99% about "how to make a better wireframe" or "how to build a better search" but only maybe 1% about what we are actually doing to the universe when we do IA.
I may be mistaken, but I suspect that's what Matt's kicking for... but this is his goddamn blog, so I'm going to stop there ;-)

Definitely a thought-provoking post... Mulled it over some more on the bus ride home today.

First thought:
It appears as though a significant proportion of IAs love (maybe need) to categorize things (probably why they get into the biz in the first place.) A common world view amongst IAs seems to be that there should be a place for everything. Hence the unending, maddeningly futile discussion as to how we can categorize and define information architecture... which, like "art", appears to be an inherently fuzzy beast. The thought that IA must come up with its own fully unique take on approach - without the insight/help of anyone who might call themselves something other than an IA - seems impossible and possibly damaging to me. It also seems to be a bit contradictory from some of the things you've said previously. I thought your IA as Fighter Pilot speech was a breath of fresh air - precisely because it drew upon the wisdom of others, particularly John Boyd, to inspire and guide what you do.

"Rap Metal" may have been an unfortunate quirk of musical evolution... And definitely, we'll continue to see those unfortunate quirks in the development of new web-based things... but isn't it possible for us to occasionaly hit upon "Peanut Butter and Chocolate"? (sorry, drawing a blank on a good music analogy... had to use food instead.)

Second thought:
I haven't met many IAs in Ottawa and this is really the first year that I've finally decided to consciously seek out the international IA community - so perhaps I'm totally out of touch with what you've experienced with regards to dogmatic, outdated approaches. Having done my own thing for the last 10 years, I've been feeling a bit like Tarzan reintroduced into society. So forgive me if I come off sounding like a bit of a monkey...

What I find particularly odd is that the IA community is so extremely insular and protective. People keep referencing the same set of people... (albeit, really smart people.) If anything is going to cause the "death of IA," this is it. I think if IA is to gain credibility and influence as a discipline - we need to start seeing ourselves as the bridge/glue between web-related schools of thought. Part of the training for my very small IA team now involves getting out and talking to almost everyone in the company about the work that they do... whether it be custom app development, enterprise search work, cms deployments, graphic design, seo, social media strategists... whatever. Part of the role of the IA is to live amongst the intersections - and understand how it can all come together to form a compelling experience. The people who can see how this all fits, are the ones who are truly indispensable to the web planning process.

Third thought:
I don't quite get what you mean by deconstruction. Do you mean it in the philosophical sense? Can you elaborate? How do we look inside the "black box"... especially when so many IA deliverables are intended to explain basic, fundamental concepts in the first place? How do you propose breaking that down?

Thanks for the awesome and thoughtful comments everyone. Rather than reply in the comments piece by piece, I'm going to take the time to think a bit and then try to reply with a post. I'm hoping it will make the response somewhat understandable and allow me to address all these great points better.

Austin, we're definitely going to have to have a few drinks. You may want a stiff one before you read my next post!